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The Venus Wars Volume 1

It’s been a while since I reviewed anything manga so here’s a rather lost classic we Westerners first saw, courtesy of Dark Horse Comics, before it made the jump to a big book edition just as the graphic novel market was finally coming into its own in 1993.

Of course, I’m no expert, so these will be thoughts restricted to the simple perspective of an interested casual collector, and measured against all other illustrated stories and not simply other manga/anime works. There are plenty of specialist sites to cater for that and they’re there at the touch of a search engine…

Vinasu Senki or The Venus Wars first appeared in Comic Nora, published by electronics specialist company Gakken between 1987 and 1990. In 1989 creator Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, who had learned his craft under “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka and is equally celebrated for his animated movies as his comics output (Space Cruiser Yamato,Gundam, Crusher Joe, Joan, Dirty Pair, Arion, Jesus, Neo Devilman and dozens more) turned the bombs, bullets and bikes epic into a stunning amine feature and oversaw its conversion to a successful computer game to supplement the four collected comic volumes.

Reprinted in the larger American graphic book standard (258x168mm) this monochrome mini-masterpiece begins in 2003 when a vast meteoric ball of ice crashes into the planet Venus and subsequently renders the place nominally habitable.

By 2083 – or Venusian year 72 – the two competing colonial nations of Aphrodia and Ishtar are days way from war. The Ishtarians are coldly calculating aggressors whose resources have long been concentrated into building a force of super-massive “Octopus Tanks” while the complacent Aphrodians seemingly do nothing to redress the situation.

All, that is, except Major Sims who is talent-scouting at the local Battle-bike stadium. These potentially lethal motorised gladiatorial contests are where young and restless teen rebels burn off their aggressions, but Sims sees them as a proving ground for his secret weapon against Ishtar’s mechanised might.

As the blistering high-speed duels continue Sims has his eye on fullback Ken Seno, a manic daredevil who clearly doesn’t care whether he lives or dies…

When the games end the Major offers the kid a chance to ride a one-ton armed and armoured super-cycle which he thinks will counter Ishtar’s advantage with nothing but speed and rocketry…

Of course Ken’s rowdy team-mates are not keen to lose their star rider and besotted groupie Maggie is terrified that her bad-boy might leave without ever realising she loves him, but the lure of that mega-bike is irresistible to the aimless youth…

When a ship from Earth arrives carrying military observers, government arbiters and the enigmatic Helen Macluth, Sims is wary, but too soon events overtake them all when Ishtar suddenly attacks Aphrodia’s capital Io City with a division of Octopus Tanks.

Ken has joined the biker elite “Hound Unit”, but his training has run into a few snags, the worst being snotty rival Kurtz, who seems to be his better in every aspect – and an arrogant rat to boot…

Macluth is injured and subsequently detained by the Aphrodians, but as the Ishtarian attack continues, hardly slowed by Sims’ super-bike squads, the government falls and radical cult leader Ayraht Akhbar seizes control of Io’s military. In the ensuing chaos Ken’s old Battle-bike team-mate Miranda and her friends break the Earthling out and they all flee the city together as a mass civilian evacuation begins…

Meanwhile Sims’ command has been usurped by Akhbar’s Mesada zealots whose insane methods seem certain to lose the war, even though the Ishtarian military command is on the verge of implosion itself with rival generals seeking to wrest supreme control away from the War’s original architects…

When the inflammatory and outspoken Ken is tortured and incarcerated by the newly-appointed Mesada commandant it sparks a mutiny amongst the Hound riders and they break him out of solitary, just as the Ishtarians begin their major offensive.

And somewhere in the hinterlands Helen Macluth wonders if she is the only person who knows or cares that the terra-forming miracle which transformed Venus and made human colonisation possible has begun to reverse itself…

Rocket-paced, with spectacularly violent action; blending bleak, cynical philosophy with trenchant human-scaled drama and politics, all whilst finding room for the odd soupcon of humour and romance, The Venus Wars was one of the best future-war thrillers to ever come out of Japan and is one of Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s most impressive epics.